Photograph album (1910) documenting Torrey Canyon Oil Company properties.
Paper; platinum photoprints; cloth binding
1910, Creators:Arnold, Ralph, 1875-1961, photographer. Album of ten large platinum photoprints (17 x 25 cm), by Ralph Arnold, of properties of the Torrey Canyon Oil Company in Ventura County.
The photographs, dated 1910, document the topography of the areas owned by the company in Eureka Canyon, Chaffee Canyon, Wiley Canyon, Santa Clara Valley, and near the Oak Ridge fault and Vaqueros and Sespe beds. Visible in some of the photographs are company oil wells, camps, and fuel tanks; other photographs show oil sands and seepages in various locations. Wiley Lake, at the head of Wiley Canyon, may have been a source of water for company operations. Torrey Canyon Oil Company, founded in 1889, merged with Hardison & Stewart Oil Company and Sespe Oil Company in 1890 to form Union Oil (Unocal). Photographs are mounted on rectos of leaves [2]-[11] of the 12-leaf album; typed paper labels for each photograph, identifying site, photographer, and date, are affixed to facing pages. Bound in plain dark brown paper covers. Spec. Coll. copy: in modern beige cloth clamshell box, with box label "Arnold. Torrey Canyon Oil Company." Gift of Luis E. Kemnitzer, former professor of geology at the California Institute of Technology. Most of the images are of rock formations, mostly labeled as Micocene, but slipped in between the survey photographs a picture of Arnold’s wife, bathed in clear Californian light, gazing at her infant. Standard Oil Archive, Torrey Ridge.